Can dogs really understand us?

New research has confirmed what dog owners have known for years: man's best
friends may not speak English, but sometimes they're too clever by half

A pug, looking alertPhoto: Alamy

By Pete Wedderburn

6:15AM GMT 28 Nov 2014

Scientists have finally revealed how to tell if your dog doesn’t understand you – or if your pooch is just playing dumb. Their wonderfully simple conclusion is that if dogs turn their heads to their right, they know precisely what we’re telling them. If they turn to their left, they haven’t a clue.

It’s all to do with the part of the brain that they use to process the sound: familiar sounds are processed on the left (causing a right-head tilt) while the right side of the brain deals with unfamiliar sounds (resulting in a left-head tilt).

As with so many scientific projects, this confirms what I and many other dog owners have known for years: talking to our pets isn’t like talking to a brick wall, at least some of the time.

I have two dogs: Kiko, a tiny five-year-old terrier, and Finzi, a leggy two-year-old lurcher. I’ve just been watching them closely as I talk to them, and the two dogs provide confirmation at a personal level of the scientists’ findings.

Kiko keeps turning her head to the right: she has always struck me as smart, and her head tilting confirms this. She’s an A-grade student in the doggy world. “Do you want to go for a walk?”, “Would you like dinner soon?” and “Isn’t it a fine day today?” all receive a tilt to the right.

Moving up a notch, “Where’s your favourite toy?” elicits a slight right-head tilt before she trots across the room to find it, and “Go to bed!” causes her to scuttle straight for her basket, with no need for head tilting at all. She knows that when she gets there, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll chuck a treat in her direction.

Finzi, by contrast, is a D student: she neither turns her head to the left, nor to the right, regardless of what I say. She just looks straight ahead at me, panting, and I know, without the help of any scientists, what’s really going on.

She has two passions in life: food and her tennis ball. Her stare, without any words, tells me what she wants: food or the tennis ball. Nothing else. She has no other interests. There’s no need for her to communicate any other message – and there’s no need for her to listen to me. She’s a talker, not a listener. Tennis ball! Food! That’s all that matters in Finzi’s interior monologue. Head tilting doesn’t exist in her communication tool box.

I know many owners who swear to me that their dogs understand every word that they say. Typically, these are people who live on their own with their dogs, so there’s a close bond between person and animal. Full conversations are had, from discussing the food in the fridge to reviewing the day’s news on the radio.

I find it difficult to explain to these people that the truth is that their dog cannot possibly have a full understanding of the English language. But now I know what’s going on. These dogs are likely to understand some of the words that are spoken (right-head tilts for “cheese”, “dog food” and “milk” ) while they’ll be baffled by other words (“Cameron”, “Parliament” and “Ukip” will produce left-head tilts).

To a casual observer, the combination of right and left-head tilts gives the impression that the dog is fully engaged with the conversation. Now we know that the dog is really saying “yes”, “yes”, “uh-huh”, then “what?” “what?”, and “I beg your pardon?”. In fairness, this is probably as scintillating as many conversations that happen between humans who share a home with one another.

Sometimes, it’s a nuisance when a dog understands human words: the classic example is “walk”, with many owners having to spell it out (“W-A-L-K”) to avoid a hysterical commotion of excitement. (Remember the Billy Connolly parody of the Tammy Wynnette song D-I-V-O-R-C-E, with divorcing owners spelling out words, such as V-E-T, in front of the family dog?) Interestingly, some dogs are smart enough to understand the spelt-out version of the word, so owners need to find an even more innovative way of telling other humans what they are planning.

I discovered a complication myself when my daughter was two years old: after walking the dog as a family, we used to occasionally call in at the local pub for a pint and a bag of crisps. We wanted to discuss this without our daughter knowing what we were up to, so we used to spell out P-U-B. We probably confused our dog by doing this, but our main aim was to avoid our child learning that pubs and crisps were being discussed. We thought we were being smart, until on one occasion we were close to the end of the walk with friends. Our two-year-old piped up in her squeaky-toddler voice “Can we go to the P-U-B?”

They say that dogs have the intelligence of a two-year-old child. Perhaps we should be grateful that they don’t have the speech to go with it.